All India Radio is bursting through the shortwave radio static in the middle of the day here in wintery AZ, all the way from Bangalore, the capital of Karnataka way down in the Indian South, whose food, music, and architecture are perhaps the furthest-out reality from Western Raj imaginations. Shortwave and brewing/homesteader activities are the perfect combination for shutting off annoying internal dialogue.
I've been brewing with hops lately, an unusual lapse (I've brewed some good stuff, no worries, just nothing to write Gotland about). I'm also messing around with keg equipment, purchased for pennies on the dollar through our modern-day Cairo Bazaar, Craigslist, with promising if often infuriating results (kegs in various stages of decay; manuals or online instructions which assume you already know all there is to know about the device in question; salesmen who assume the same, etc.). However, one eventually realizes that there can't really be all that much to it, and there isn't. Shortwave radio, needless to say, is nice to have on in the background while dodging another irritating pothole on the golden road to house husbandry.
And when the station is All India Radio, South Indian All India Radio, all bets are off for intellectual and sensual fulfillment. My Goddess, the female vocals alone are enough to melt the heart of the most depressed, stressed-out, anonymous editorial staffer at the Economist. It's that beautiful, and I consider AIR a cherished purveyor of the most mysterious and beautiful radio music on Planet Earth, in any format. She's all yours, give or take wash-outs of scratchy noise, at 11670 kHz at noon-2pm at AZ Swigs HQ.
And hey, once in a while, the English language news is almost barely decipherable! The music almost always comes through, wafting over the world in impossible gymnastic twisting leaps, to land in your kitchen in real time.
People were ringing death knells for shortwave more than ten years ago. Unlikely! It's too international, it's too useful, too free from governmental control, and, if you're doing morse code on a crystal set, far too cheap. It will be used as long as human beings require any kind of communications at a distance. As I write this, local radio interference and the sheer distance sends the lilting voice into the static. Gone. That's the joy of shortwave. Never the same thing twice; always fortuitous to make a good "catch"; a tech sport that's the closest thing to deep-sea fishing on a boat in middle of the ocean.
The topic of kegs walks up to the bar, heavily weighted with CO2 of opinion. Charlie Papazian said that people never regret having kegged beer as an option. I agree. It's ridiculously easy to dump your finished beer into a keg, push some CO2 on top of it and through it, then, a few days or even hours later, tap and pour. I've heard many colleagues say that after discovering kegs, they never want to bottle again.
After a few weeks playing with the kegs and gear, I'm on the fence. I think kegs are a great way for experimenters to quickly taste/tweak new ideas. I can brew an ale in a week and a half, force-carbonate, and have something quite drinkable within a day or two. With bottles, the experimenter is looking at six weeks from brewing day to finished product. If one desires a stable source of good, simple ale, kegs are far easier to clean and manage than those mountains of bottles -- not to mention the depressing discovery that those really cool bottles that one saved from that Mönchshof or other swing-top dispenser, are, inevitably, the first to get nasty bacterial bottle sludge that nothing seems to clean.
A "Corny Keg" is just a large stainless steel soft-drink container, with metal tubes inside for beer and gas, and a double ball-lock and connector design that surely merits some kind of Yankee Ingenuity Nobel Prize. They are fool-proof (touch wood), and, with their companion, the CO2 tank, have a short learning curve for something so seemingly intimidating. Force carbonating is an art learned through experience, like so many things. I haven't mastered it yet, but, for Bacchus' sake, I'm only on my second keg. Currently I'm using low outdoor temperatures to chill the beer and help the gas molecules along their merry way.
However, I still believe that bottle-conditioning, done right, makes the best beer of all. Keg-conditioning, which the British call "Real Ale", is the same basic process, and also superior to CO2 force-carbonated beer, for the same reasons:
1. In bottle/keg conditioning, yeast is excreting CO2 in direct proportion to how much sugar you feed it. You fine tune the carbonation by how much sugar you add. Now, one would think that fine tuning bubbles would be child's play with a CO2 tank, but so far, in my experience, one seems to end up with a really dull mouth-feel of dish-soapy carbonation, or, worse, over-carbonation.
I like my carbonation complex and scintillating, like the kiss of a nymphette on a mid-winter's night. Imagine, if you will, the millions of tiny dancing bubbles in a glass of champagne or a bottle of Chimay, which tickle your taste buds and esophagus; now, compare that with the standard brands foam from your local micro brewer. Even when force-carbonation is done with love and subtlety (Borderlands -- long may they rock -- is the best local example), the result is not the same. Something magical happens during bottle conditioning. I don't know the science of why but I know bottle-conditioned beer when I taste it. Go ahead, blindfold me.
2. Force carbonating seems, to this author, to create a standardization of mouth-feel in beer, which is perhaps more similar in character to soapy water than champagne. This may work fantastically for simpler beers, and may be less suitable for stronger, more esoteric beers, or beers with unusual adjuncts, or beers of any kind which need age to bring out the best in them. Ah...
3. Aging. Some ales, particularly those lacking ridiculous, tongue-scraping levels of hopping madness, simply taste much better after sitting around in a cellar for a month, several months, or a year. Most of us don't wait so long, but even a month can turn a pleasant jumble of flavors into cellar-aged perfection. Flavors which used to clash don't clash any more, and so on.
4. Many people go on about the need for freshness in beer. Certainly, with a keg, you want to drink it sooner rather than later after it's tapped. But for bottles, the entire fresh beer craze is entirely the result of the inherent weaknesses of industrial mass-produced lagers, and has nothing whatsoever to do with old-fashioned, bottle-conditioned beer. I shall have a lot more to say about this.
I'd be very interested to hear from people who are brewing subtle beers with scintillating carbonation using CO2 on force feed for a day or two. In the meantime, I will stick to my guns until proven otherwise: Kegs for the simpler "daily drinker" standbys, bottles for the subtle, weird and wonderful things. That program suits me fine. The problem is my love for the weird and wonderful things.